1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an information processing apparatus and method and a program and, more particularly, to an information processing apparatus and method and a program that are configured to facilitate the editing of scalably encoded code streams.
2. Description of the Related Art
Recently, the popularization of digital cinema based on digital data instead of films has been promoted in the production, delivery, and showing of movies. The standardization of digital cinema has been being specified by standardization organizations, such as DCI (Digital Cinema Initiative) composed of seven major U.S. movie delivery companies.
For example, the DCI standard laid down by DCI defines two image resolutions, 4K (4,096×2,160 pixels) and 2K (2,048×1,080 pixels) and specifies, for the video compression algorithm, the use of JPEG 2000 (Joint Photographic Experts Group 2000) for (scalably) encoding images so as to be able to decode with two or more resolutions (refer to Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2006-311327 for example).
In a work flow of digital cinema production, an image scanned from a film is captured in an image format of Tiff (Tagged Image File Format) or DPX (Digital Picture Exchange), for example, to be converted into non-compressed (or baseband) digital data (baseband data). This baseband data is managed as master data, on which authoring processing such as noise cancellation is executed.
Referring to FIG. 1, there is shown an example of how authoring processing is executed.
As shown in FIG. 1, a frame image 10 obtained by scanning a movie film may have a noise component caused by dust or damage for example on the scanned film. An expanded view 11 shows a noise-containing range 10A of the frame image 10. In the case of the example shown in FIG. 1, as shown in the expanded view 11, the frame image 10 has noise 12 caused by dust attached to the film. In a work flow of digital cinema production, the processing of removing such a noise component is executed (authoring processing).
However, as the resolution goes up to very high levels such as 4K for example, the amount of data increases accordingly, so that, if the baseband data is the master data, a storage capacity necessary for storing the master data, a network band necessary for transferring the master data, and a load and a processing time necessary for executing various processes on the master data increase accordingly.
Therefore, in order to decrease the amount of data, a method was proposed in which data (a code stream) compressed in a predetermined data compression algorithm such as JPEG 2000 for example is used for the master data. As described above, the JPEG 2000 standard is one of scalable coding methods, so that the JPEG 2000 is compliant with two or more resolutions such as 4K and 2K.